tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86853051133525509472014-09-30T23:22:59.958-07:00Caucasian/American StudiesA positive affirmation...Sensei/gakuseihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05887984953289795108noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8685305113352550947.post-58220535116845923792009-05-22T12:50:00.001-07:002009-05-22T12:57:46.096-07:00Send In The Clowns<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/ShcCIbHBYyI/AAAAAAAAAAc/Us6mDAQiuU0/s1600-h/wife-power-clown-disrupts-kkk-rally.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 211px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/ShcCIbHBYyI/AAAAAAAAAAc/Us6mDAQiuU0/s320/wife-power-clown-disrupts-kkk-rally.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5338738227010429730" border="0" /></a>This is an example of something very positive, that can credited to the Caucasian/Americans in this picture. This is a republished article from <a href="http://www.neatorama.com">www.neatorama.com</a><br /><br />And now...<br /><blockquote><p><em>Unfortunately for [VNN](also known as the KKK), the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.</em></p> <p><em>Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html</em></p> <p><em>“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.</em></p> <p><em>“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.</em></p> <p><em>“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.</em></p> <p><em>At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”</em></p> <p><em>The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”</em></p> </blockquote>Sensei/gakuseihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05887984953289795108noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8685305113352550947.post-53858162142634636672009-05-01T12:23:00.001-07:002009-05-01T13:48:40.431-07:00Are European/Americans considered Caucasian/Americans?<span style="font-weight: bold;">I have been asked recently why I have not chosen the term 'European/Americans' as my point of interest. My answer has been the same for years, now. There are non white people in this group. Spain and Portugal are European countries. I have never heard anyone in America, to this day, refer to either one of these cultures as white. This blog is a specific research and study on how to identify white people, include them in the list of studies that they probably started a long time ago, and to have an acceptable title for the group. The term and title should also be accepted by the group itself, as well as the rest of the cultures in America, without causing too much negative feed back. (The last part sounds impossible to me, really. What, with all the ensuing text battles in the comment boxes all over the world wide web.) Regardless of that, the initial research for this blog must be condoned in such a way that the people, especially Caucasian/Americans, feel invited to add their opinions with out fear of harsh remarks. Which I will be monitoring through out this blogs existence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Which means there will be a few things to consider before your comments are approved:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">- What inspired your specific comment? (Feel free to copy and paste quotes from anywhere.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">- The reason why you think your comment should be posted in the public 'blogosphere,' where children, young adults and the elderly can read them. (If this was not meant for social and anthropological studies, I wouldn't give a...)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">- Why you think your comment will improve relations between all cultures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">- Profanity, I don't mind...unless it offends someone grotesquely. You may use * to censor your own profanity, if you like. Otherwise comment will not be approved until re edited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">That's all, hopefully. I'm sure this will be mayhem at some point. The comment box is like the 'Enter the Dragon' of on line text arenas. Brave are the meek who the inherit the earth, laptop by laptop...</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(sigh)</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Oh...</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">And don't forget to remember that...</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">...African/Americans, Asian/Americans, Latin/Americans, European/Americans,Pacific Island/Americans, Other/Americans and even Canine/Americans are already established collegiate courses.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">'Exclusion' of Caucasian/Americans was the reason I started this blog .</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Why Caucasian/Americans, of all people? Still doesn't make sense to me, yet.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hopefully it will one day...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">And no...I wasn't serious about Canine/Americans.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">But maybe someone else will start that blog.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who knows?</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">And now...here is the very first 'blog-item' and feed back offered to me by my friend and cafe' colleague, Tim. We are not students of the street. We are students on the street. I told him about this blog and his response was the beginning of an entire repertoire of horrible accounts from 'white' American history. But before he could get all wound up, I interrupted him, politely and said," uh...no...not that way, Tim. The other way..." He, impressively stopped on a dime with a sinister grin and replied,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> "...Oh...the OTHER way... "<br />We both both nodded with a smile...and then I walked home.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">That afternoon I got this in my e mail.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Thank you Tim!</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/SftYXLz3tFI/AAAAAAAAAAU/9z4EcAAnQDM/s1600-h/That%27s+how+I+roll....htm"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 258px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/SftYXLz3tFI/AAAAAAAAAAU/9z4EcAAnQDM/s320/That%27s+how+I+roll....htm" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330951739253699666" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tim happens also to be Caucasian/American<br />and it seems he understands</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> what the heck I'm trying to do here!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">This shall continue...</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">peace</span>Sensei/gakuseihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05887984953289795108noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8685305113352550947.post-32242038224830922982009-04-25T02:09:00.000-07:002009-04-25T03:11:09.825-07:00Why White People Are Called 'Caucasian?'<span style="font-weight: bold;">Alone I sit with a cigarette lit and burning. Wondering what I've gotten myself into.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> I used google to locate the beginning of my research. I started by typing 'Caucasian American Studies' into the browser. Although the following article was not on the top page for this specific search, I kept scrolling until I discovered something from a prestigious and well respected university. Being that my goal is to eventually place this particular category of study into the college courses of America, I wanted to find a high ranking institutional learning facility. I stopped at page 4 on google search for 'Caucasian American Studies.' What I found was a humogous downloadable pdf file from Yale...<br /><br />This is an excerpt from:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race November 7-8, 2003 Yale University New Haven, Connecticut</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">On first thought, the theme of collective degradation would seem to exclude white people, not only because white people are not now considered particularly degraded—at least, not as a race—and the themes of "slavery, resistance, and abolition" apply more intuitively to people of African rather than European descent. Even one of the classic texts in the history of whiteness, The Invention of the White Race, by Theodore W. Allen, associates slavery and race with black people. But as Allen realizes, the function of the general concept of race is to establish and maintain hierarchical boundaries in human taxonomy, even when the categories are not "black" and "white"; Allen, therefore, begins the first volume of his study with the case of the Irish.</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Sound as it is, Allen's Irish opening is relatively rare in race studies, which usually finger blackness compulsively. Blackness, however, is not my subject here; whiteness is. I address the issue of white people as "Caucasian" as a heuristic: usually the question is not asked, because whiteness has not been problematized as thoroughly as blackness. My question of why white people are called "Caucasian" and its answer belong to the relatively new field of whiteness studies, a field nowhere as developed as African-American studies, with its sophisticated literature on race, enriched by the scholars featured in this conference. Including the invention of "Caucasian" as the name of white people makes good sense in a conference dedicated to collective degradation, for the still current term "Caucasian" connects directly to collective degradation, in the form of the gendered, eastern slave trade, via the network of learned societies that so deeply influenced the history of science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this essay turns to Göttingen in 1795 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1762-1840), who is known for having invented the association, let me locate the Caucasus and its peoples.<br /><br /> Obviously the name "Caucasian" connects to the Caucasus, the 440,000 square kilometers of land separating the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The two ranges of the Caucasus Mountains cross the region running roughly east to west. </span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">The northern, Caucasus range forms the natural border with Russia; the southern, lesser Caucasus forms the natural border with Turkey and Iran. Anthropologists classify the fifty Caucasian ethnic groups into three main categories: Caucasian, Indo-European, and Altaic. Among the Altaic peoples are the Kalmuck, whom Blumenbach and his colleagues considered an embodiment of ugliness. Circassian peoples and Georgians, famed for their beauty, also fall into the category of Caucasian people. Known to Westerners since prehistoric times, this geographically and ethnically complex area has been subject to numerous overlords and considerable confusion. They have sent slaves into Western Europe and Asia Minor since before the time of Herodotus. </span> <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf">(continue reading article)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/SfLat-lzahI/AAAAAAAAAAM/hg_k12bJPTQ/s1600-h/caucasus-where-map.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FL8LtUJVE04/SfLat-lzahI/AAAAAAAAAAM/hg_k12bJPTQ/s320/caucasus-where-map.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328561792563243538" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">That is a story behind the origin of the meaning of Caucasian.<br />Here are more links to sites that offer more literal definitions of Caucasians:</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race">* Wikipedia has their definition here.</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Caucasian"><br />* The Free Dictionary by Farlex has theirs here.</a><br /><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2198124/">* SLATE has an article written by Derek Thompson</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> on the origin behind the name for Caucasian people. Crediting Johann Friedrich Blumenbach with the late 18th century definition.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.inmagine.com/searchterms/caucasian_people.html">Inmagine has photographs of Caucasian people.</a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">(Take a break from reading for a sec!)</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Well...this is starting to get interesting already. I think it really makes a difference, depending on the attitude you have, when you decide to research something specific. Google will be my tool for now. It should be even more interesting when actual people start adding their research, too. I'm sure the discoveries will be worth it.<br />Until next entry...<br /><br /></span>Sensei/gakuseihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05887984953289795108noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8685305113352550947.post-29458183685158483742009-04-24T09:36:00.000-07:002009-05-01T12:22:57.369-07:00Introduction to Caucasian/American StudiesAs an American citizen, I am vaguely familiar with the most popular versions of our history that have been taught in school. From the beginning, <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region> has had a long list of very famous people that helped to create our country. And some that are not so famous, of course. Among the list of people who are logged into the history books of our nation, you will always find some sort of recognizable adjective attached to them that helps to define who they are. Christopher Columbus, a Spaniard; Sitting Bull or Tatanka Yotanka, an indigenous native Sioux Indian; Harriet Tubman, an African/American...all reputable figures of American history and the like. Then there's George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony...all very famous individuals pulled from the same list of Americans in the same randomness in which I began with. The only difference between the first random selection and the last? Ethnicity. It seems that most, if not all of the historic Americans who are Caucasian, are not mentioned as being Caucasian. Why? I don't know. Do you?<br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br />As this topic winds its way into a debatable issue, I would like to add that in colleges all over the nation, one may choose to study courses such as African/American studies, Latin/American studies, Asian/American studies and probably any specific culture as it pertains to its roots here in America. Which means that information from these courses are being offered to Americans and non Americans about these specific cultures. But to say Asian/American is not really that specific, is it? The term Asian/Americans spans the entire variety of all Asian cultures. Right?<br /><br />So at this point you may already be wondering, what is the point of this blog? What does this have to do with the title? Well, as I've mentioned already, "Asian/American'"is a general and loose term for all Asian Americans. Yet it is still offered as a course in which to obtain a degree in college. Which means you are required to study Asians who are Americans. And so what does that feel like to Asians, here in America, to be studied? Do you like to be studied? And if that is ok, then what is the difference between studying Asian/Americans and Caucasian/Americans, an equally accepted loose definition of all Caucasians who are American.<br /><br /> * Now, I know that this is already a delicate topic to start up because I find myself gingerly browsing through my mind for the right way to say all of this. And I think the right way to say what I am attempting to say is: Why leave one group out and include the rest? It is the year 2009 and I am beginning to believe that this sort of dialogue should be accepted and understood as something that is enlightening and informative to all Americans. I also believe that what makes this country so powerfully magnanimous is the fact that all cultures may have their pride and dignity, individually, as it is a part of a greater whole. What makes the union of this country so different( but not necessarily better ) from the rest of the world, is the fact that it is union of all the worlds cultures. And to not include the Cauasian/American culture as a college course, with the rest of the ethnic study courses, would seem ridiculous to any of the great historic figures I've mentioned above.<br /><br />It is true that there has and probably always will be tension between races here in America. And that, historically, Caucasian/Americans can be perceived as cause for a certain percentage. But who's writing the story? And when does the story end? And, of course it is not ALL negative. The civil war has already proven that fact. It took a nation of milions to win that war. So when will it be time to credit, specifically, Caucasians for the great moments of our incredible history, without causing discomfort to the rest of our ethnic peoples of this nation? To include Caucasians, specifically, for the amount of work, the signed papers and legislative decisions and the civil laws passed to benefit us all, as Americans. To give them pride for who they are as people without separation from the rest. To finally make possible a dialogue in which we can begin to truly hone in on the problems we face as a nation. So that we can begin to do away with the guilt of our past. I have always known that when you let someone recognize the goodness within themselves, the reciprocation is equally reassuring. Uncertainty has always led to mistrust and insecurity of ones feelings. But if we are certain of our mutual understandings; if we share the same information; if common knowledge is the sense that is common ground...it opens up an entire different path of communication. We might be lacking a good portion of information from the Cauacasian culture in our studies.<br /><br />My inspiration for this blog comes from a man by the name of Christian Landers. His comedic approach has been somewhat enlightening and maybe the only textual information I have so far on this delicate topic. His openness and understanding combined with a witty, dry sense of humor allows me to see through the topic and into the heart of his brilliance. His blog is called <a href="http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/">Stuff White People Like</a>...it's very funny. His writing style is both hillarious and deceptively informative to say the least. His message seems to be that Caucasians are really not that different from the rest of us if you are already laughing...<br /><br />Well...that's my introduction. I am inviting all to join in. It would do me some good to have some input, as I am only equipped with a general education diploma. So...help? I am preparing myself for some outlandish comments and some enlightening information from my fellow Americans along the way.<br />So, lets get this course developed and into the universities and colleges someday.<br />The kids might love it.<br />And yes...I am not Caucasian. And no I'm not completely Asian.<br />And...no...this isn't Tiger Woods either.<br />But close...<br /><br />To be continued...</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Sensei/gakuseihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05887984953289795108noreply@blogger.com0